The Mayor at Midterm

Elizabeth Kolbert discusses Michael Bloomberg and covering City Hall.

This week in the magazine and here online (see Fact), Elizabeth Kolbert takes a look at how Michael Bloomberg is doing after two years as New York’s mayor. Here, with The New Yorker’s Daniel Cappello, Kolbert talks about Bloomberg’s successes, his image problem, and life as a political reporter.

DANIEL CAPPELLO: You’ve written about both local and national politics. Do you find one more compelling than the other?

ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Covering local politics is a little bit like playing minor-league ball: you never feel that you are at the center of the action. I've always liked local politics, though, in part for that reason. Everything that is happening in Washington is also happening in Albany and at City Hall, just on a smaller (and somewhat goofier) scale. You can get right up close to the players and watch them as they try to figure out what, exactly, it is that they are supposed to be doing.

This week in the magazine, you write about Michael Bloomberg. How is he doing as mayor?

I think on substance he gets a pretty good grade. He has led the city through a difficult time. About a year ago, a fiscal crisis looked like a genuine possibility; now the city is poised to end the fiscal year with a surplus. He has shown that it is possible to keep the crime rate down without generating the kind of antagonism between the N.Y.P.D. and the community that marked the Giuliani administration. And he has embraced the challenge of reorganizing the school system, although it is still too early to tell precisely what the result of his efforts will be.

In terms of style, I think he gets a “needs improvement.” He is not a very effective public speaker, and, what’s probably more significant, he doesn’t give the impression of being terribly interested in the problems of ordinary people. This is not to say that he isn't concerned; it's just that he has trouble conveying it. And, as Hillary Clinton proved with her infamous “listening tour,” people really do respond to a public figure's level of solicitude, however contrived it may be.

How does Bloomberg compare to New York mayors of the recent past—Rudy Giuliani, David Dinkins, Ed Koch?

Rudy Giuliani and Ed Koch were—and are—incredibly theatrical. People who had never met them still felt they had a very strong, direct relationship with them. That was not true of David Dinkins, and, of course, he wasn't reëlected. Bloomberg does not have the sort of personality that fills a room, or, for that matter, a television screen. This is a problem for him, once again, in terms of his relationship to voters, although not necessarily in terms of his ability to govern.

One of the paradoxes of Bloomberg’s personality is that, in spite of his wealth and social status, many people say that he comes across as an ordinary man, especially in person. He’s also been known to ride the subway to work. What are we to make of his image?

Bloomberg grew up in a middle-class household (in Medford, Massachusetts), and he seems perfectly comfortable dealing with people of different socioeconomic backgrounds, and of different races and ethnicities. He just doesn't seem that interested in getting out and talking to people. To be fair to him, many politicians are probably not that interested in talking to people; it's just that in order to get elected in the first place they had to learn to pretend to be. Because of his money, Bloomberg missed this step—it's sort of like skipping third grade—and went directly to being mayor.

This is a Democrat-turned-Republican mayor. How has the question of Bloomberg’s party sympathy affected his mayoralty?

Bloomberg is not very interested in ideology. I think it's fair to say that he has liberal leanings—he believes that one of the primary functions of government is to improve the lives of the unfortunate, and he is willing to tax the more fortunate in order to do this—but essentially he is a technocrat. That being said, he is in an awkward position in terms of party politics. A lot of New Yorkers are very unhappy with the Bush Administration, and when the city hosts the Republican National Convention, this summer, I imagine that the Mayor will be pressed to distance himself from the President, a situation that he will have to somehow finesse. Right now, he is trying, in essence, to have it both ways—to portray himself as a loyal Republican and, at the same time, as not a Republican.

Bloomberg has tried to impose a business culture onto City Hall. How effective has his style been?

I think that in terms of managing city government he's been pretty effective. He's hired some good commissioners and given them a lot of latitude. (He's also hired some mediocre commissioners and perhaps given them too much latitude.) A lot of city government is directed not at doing the best job but at protecting turf, and Bloomberg has tried to rationalize this; for example, he wants to merge the dispatch services of the police and fire departments to handle emergencies better.

Politically, though, he has not always been terribly effective, and this is especially true of his dealings with Albany. He seems to think that other elected officials will respond to rational arguments, when really what is required is theatrics.

Bloomberg spent seventy-two million dollars of his own money in his last campaign—the most of any American mayoral candidate in history. And Jon Corzine spent more than sixty million dollars of his own to win a New Jersey Senate seat. Should we expect this to be, increasingly, the way that candidates secure office?

I do think that there's a bit of a trend here, if anything that requires having several hundred million dollars in the bank can be called a trend. Both Corzine and Bloomberg proved that if you are willing to shell out enough money you can get elected with no prior political experience. Of course, many millionaires have tried to get elected in the past, and some have failed, but I think that the dominance of advertising (and our general veneration of success) is making it easier and easier to spend your way into office.

Who are the most likely rivals to Bloomberg when he runs for reëlection, and is it too soon to say what that race will be like?

It's too soon to tell who the Democratic nominee will be, although several people are pretty clearly planning to run, including the former Bronx borough president Fernando Ferrer and the current speaker of the City Council, Gifford Miller. Unless the Mayor's polls turn around pretty dramatically in the next year, I suspect that it will be a hard-fought and very, very expensive race. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the March 1, 2004, issue.

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